Let them sweat

Recently, a big part of the Mid-Atlantic and the eastern Midwest had to suffer from severe power outages during an intense, history-making, climate change-fueled heat wave, due to a powerful derecho event.  (If you haven't heard about that I don't know what hole you live in, but a derecho is basically a very strong, very fast moving thunderstorm complex.  It does most of its damage with straight-line, Cat 1 to Cat 2 hurricane force winds.  In the forested East, this meant bringing down a lot of trees and power lines.  Hence lots of urban and suburban regions lost power for significant numbers of days.  That marks the end of the lesson).

Anyways, it was apparently tough, sweaty, and not much fun.  I can vouch for that, we were without power from Friday to late Sunday.  Glad I didn't have to go through another hot night.  And being in the power business, I can see why people get grouchy when they don't have it.  (I pretty much knew that, but this certainly brought the lesson home).

Got lucky on the food front, because Saturday was a grocery run.

Anyway, thinking back on all that, I figure that I should tell the Japanese people (for whom I hold no great respect on the conservation front considering that they are bringing bluefin tuna to the brink of extinction for the sake of high-end sushi) that if they want to sweat it out during the summer because they are afraid of nuclear power, which in my opinion is the only way to avoid more climate change, stronger storms, bigger and longer droughts, flooding, sea level rise, biodiversity devastation, and overall downside trends for much of this good Earth, then they can just go ahead and sweat.   I, on the other hand, think that we should try to come up with a way to get to a future with both power and a viable terrestrial environment for most of the world's people.  People say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Oh, and I should add, I'm very sorry about what happened to your country with the earthquake and tsunami.  Yes, I know the derecho was very small potatoes compared to that.  But these things happen, and they help tell us how to fix things so that the next time they happen -- and I'm sorry your island country is in a location that's bound to have more earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis -- then the effects won't be so devastating. Hopefully.

Nuclear restart generates power, protest in Japan

"But there are no easy answers for Japan. The nation has no known fossil-fuel reserves of its own, and began relying heavily to nuclear power as a home-grown resource after the global oil shocks of the 1970s. The nation's faith in the safety of its nuclear fleet was shattered when the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami touched off the crisis at Fukushima. Since then, Japan has been ramping up fossil-fuel imports, aggressively promoting renewables and conservation, and trying to plot a new energy future.

While debate continues on a long-term plan, though, Noda concluded Japan couldn't make it through summer without some measure of atomic energy—a decision that now has driven opposition into the streets."